Arya Ray reflects on attending the one-day conference Gender & Genre: Medical Humanities and the Moving Image, held at Durham University in September 2024.
Visual representations of embodied experiences often hold the power to move the beholder, and it is conceivable that the moving image can thus be used to reveal a range of subjectivities, epistemologies, and structural inequalities using tools of visual representation and narrative storytelling. Through the lens of the moving image, this one day conference held at Durham University zoomed in on the entanglements of gender and genre through a broad range of critical perspectives not only through health and a Medical Humanities lens, but from interdisciplinary perspectives across Literary Studies, Art History and Visual Studies, Film Studies, Critical Theory, Queer and Trans Theory and Feminist Philosophy.
This review will focus on four presentations – one from each of the day’s panels – that collectively summarise my key takeaways from the conference as an attendee.
I am haunted: Approaching the Unspeakable
‘To be haunted and write from that location … is not a methodology or consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as a set of new rules and an identity; it produces its own insights and blindnesses’ (Gordon, p. 22).
Edyta Just (Linköping University), the first speaker of the day, develops this very methodology to navigate the ‘insights and blindnesses’ based on her first-hand experience of endometriosis (Gordon, 1997, p. 22). Among a panel centred on gendered, bodily experiences of ‘unspeakability’ and their relation to the horror genre, Just recounts and analyses her own experience of illness. Her presentation was structured as a series of excerpts from her own process of writing about her illness by juxtaposing bodily and medical encounters with tropes from supernatural horror, interspersed with repetitive stills from Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015). Just talks about the verisimilitude between the ill body and the haunted body and posits that narrativising the body’s experience of chronic illness, which can be unfamiliar and incomprehensible, through supernatural horror, which uses familiar methods to approach the incomprehensible, can facilitate a reconciliation between oneself and one’s ill body.
Just’s written pieces mirror the structure of the presentation itself, alternating between descriptions of the movie and of her embodied experience: ‘Suddenly there is too much of me in me—a strange “lump” is showing on the right, lower side of the abdomen and it moves, and then it disappears deep under the skin. A sudden clapping of the hands, the clock that stops at 3.07 am every night, a strange smell in the rooms, a bumping on the door’ (The Conjuring, 2013).
Presumably, through the pieces, Just is telling her own body’s story to herself as she asks questions such as ‘what do you fear?’ and ‘will I ever be back?’, but this method which Just says is ‘undoubtedly close to writing therapy’ (Just, 2024, pp. 201-214), universally speaks to experiences of illness. Supernatural entities often possess the power to expel familiarity through the classical stages of demonic possession: infestation, oppression and possession (The Conjuring, 2013), but Just’s method recontextualises these motifs of horror movies to develop a vocabulary for approaching one’s own experience of illness – ‘I don’t know what it is, but it haunts me’ (infestation), ‘believe me’ (oppression), ‘seizing control’ (possession). In the same way a ‘vulnerable’ body’s encounter with a malicious spirit can lead to a schism between the mind and the body, the body’s encounter with chronic illness can render it unfamiliar, and medical narratives can be just as defamiliarizing. Using the language of horror movies and the experience of watching a horror movie arms one with a vocabulary. Knowing a demon’s name gives you power over the demon, and developing a vocabulary for your illness prepares you to fight the anxiety and loneliness that can accompany chronic illness.
Written in first and second person, the pieces elicit an emotional response from the audience even though the experience of illness is highly personalised. Through storytelling, Just proposes that this not only devises a language for oneself but also prepares oneself for conversations with medical personnel – overwriting the traditional medical narrative of pain scales and normality with more descriptive and subjective narratives of embodied illness. Edyta Just’s presentation was marked by vulnerability and highlighted the role of the moving image in approaching the unspeakable, unravelling infinities such as the mind/body split and the role of film in contextualising our own bodies that many of the following speakers echoed.
(Not) One feather at a time: Fostering Multiplicity
Cat Chong, a PhD Candidate at Nanyang Technological University Singapore, presented on genrecripping human-animal entanglements places its focus on Abi Palmer Invents the Weather, a series of four wonderfully refreshing and experimental short films featuring a collaboration between writer-artist Abi Palmer and her two cats, Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola.
Abi Palmer Invents the Weather is structured around Palmer’s experiences with fibromyalgia, and how she uses multimedia modes of art to navigate this experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Palmer metaphorically ‘invents the weather’ for her cats, using foraged objects to create artificial indoor environments that are ‘cat-accessible’ to mirror the outside weather conditions. Through Palmer’s masterful amalgamation of the environmental film, collage, and autobiographical modes of storytelling, Chong explores the role of crip-queer pride in reorganising and questioning power structures of knowledge and meaning-making.
Palmer’s introduces elements of the outside world to her cats ‘one feather at a time’ – attempting to recreate every feature of each season that she thinks are central to it such as Rain for autumn, Fog for winter, Light for Spring and Heat for summer. This method prompts Chong to ask, ‘what genre is the weather?’. This question offers a key entry point into their interrogation of how genre, and indeed gender, is captured within superfluous layers of distinctions. Gender finds its etymological origin in ideas of genre and thus Chong shows that the sociocultural categorisation of genre into disciplines and gender into labels has the potential to be reframed as embodied forms of knowledge.
Chong’s presentation subsequently addressed Palmer’s purposeful untethering from verified institutions of genres by disrupting the viewers’ preconceived relations between the tactile signifier and the abstract signified – such as a disco ball to perform the role of the Sun. Traditionally ‘universal’ phenomena are queered through the cats’ defamiliarized experiences. Chong speaks about how this destabilisation of genre can foster a sense of multiplicity of identity (Allen, Felicity, 2023). Palmer attempts to control something that is uncontrollable, and in this, her representation is absurdly urgent and wildly frantic which deliberately ‘unstraightens’ systems of compulsory able-bodiedness and heteropatriarchal modes of actualisation.
Chong uses Palmer’s work, positioned at the confluence of the arthouse film and nature documentary, to posit the imperative for dissolving institutional categories of genre/gender using crip-queer discourses. This dissolution, they posit, utilises its multiplicity of disruption to productively and actively create new forms of knowledge.
Chong’s presentation was part of the panel on objects, bodies and their manifestations in artists’ interpretations of moving images, with presentations about running as a creative act of poesis as well as fluidity in embodied creative practices, but the themes of their talk resonated across panels with presenters such as Anjana Menon, who spoke about the multiplicity of gendered representation in Malayalam cinema.
We leak and seethe: Representing, and Holding Attention
Lynn Wray, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, brought the audience’s attention to a collaborative project between the LivingBodiesObjects team at the University of Leeds and the Bhopal Medical Appeal that sought to formulate innovative modes of representing the continuing crisis of water contamination in Bhopal, with a focus on drawing and holding attention.
In 1984, Bhopal saw what has been termed the world’s worst industrial disaster – an operational oversight caused a chemical reaction in the Union Carbide pesticide plant and an estimated minimum of 500,000 people of nearby towns were exposed to a highly toxic gas. While the world’s attention was drawn to this moment, the slow poisoning of the water bodies of Bhopal have escaped representation, and Wray’s talk highlighted the project’s modes of visualising the ‘slow violence’ that was wrought upon the communities in Bhopal and continues to impact their existence even today.
‘By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, 2011, p. 2).
Wray presented visual examples of evidence of this ‘slow violence’, which included both embodied symptoms as well as effects displaced upon material objects. Photos of domestic objects such as buckets and bowls that have rapidly corroded due to the slow poisoning of their water systems represented the impacted communities’ slow and prolonged fight for clean water and efficient supporting infrastructure. A noteworthy theme of this presentation was the project’s focus on devising a mode of representation that not only captured the attention of the viewer, but also holds one’s attention beyond the preliminary encounter. The role of the moving image in prolonging the moment of encounter here was clear, as Wray introduced the scrollamation drawings that her team had produced – slow-moving images of the slow contamination of material and water bodies – on a digital storytelling platform called Shorthand. The scrollamation told the story of natural erosion brought about by the slow violence of contaminated water, and compelled the viewer to engage with the visuals for longer periods of time.
Illness will always stay in my records: Actualising Hidden Experiences
My fourth and final theme that was highlighted and reiterated throughout the Gender and Genre conference was the role of the moving image and more broadly, medical humanities, in actualising hidden experiences of illness, marginalisation, and othering.
This theme was captured in Marta Cenedese’s wonderfully captivating presentation, reflecting on Lotta Petronella’s documentary film Själö: Island of Souls (2020), part of the concluding panel on spaces and actualisations of madness and wellbeing. The documentary, based on archival research, contemporary observations, and meditative visual storytelling, tells the story of Själö, an island which has been home to people with leprosy, incurable mentally ill women who were beyond rehabilitation, and biological research institutes over time. It intertwines the island’s natural beauty with its melancholic history, using non-conventional approaches to sequential storytelling to reflect on themes of memory, isolation, illness and shared meaning-making.
Cenedese explores the haptic dimensions of film as a medium, positing the camera as an organ of tactile, oral and visual touch. Själö: Island of Souls uses tools of juxtaposition and assemblage to layer a multiplicity of voices and points in time that intersect and overlap – hauntingly beautiful visuals, a meditative narrative voice, and historical context. Cenedese uses material evidence such as recovered fragments of letters that had been written by the confined women of the island but never sent to make visible what had been visible in the past, but due to the temporality of the island, were difficult to voice in hindsight. The hauntings of the island in the form of the illnesses of its inhabitants, are made visible through visual storytelling in the form of motifs that represent the island’s ‘slow poisoning’ such as aspen trees, insects, and closing windows. As the audience at the conference sat still for a few moments to watch excerpts from the film, the images of dusk in the film were mirrored by the growing darkness visible from the venue’s windows, and the power of the moving image to bring the unfamiliar close was palpable.
The film juxtaposes the beautiful flora of the island with the palpable nature of the body through what Cenedese calls ‘haptic shocks’ – embodied voiceovers that are antithetic to their visuals, urging the viewer to dissociate from the beauty and find new meanings through these resonances. The meditative visuals are interspersed by moments of sudden touch – cupped hands in the rain, a hand on the blueprints of the asylum – hands extending through time and history to touch those which have been rendered invisible. Cenedese concluded with a quote from the director that features in the documentary:
‘When I was 32, I was taken to a psychiatric ward. In the admission letter the cause is “psychosis and fear of God” … I haven’t seen a psychiatrist in five years. I’m well. But my sickness will always stay in my records.’
Through this conclusion, Petronella makes her own story of illness a part of a collective of women that stretches across time. The film galvanises a mode of conceptualising illness that extends beyond the individual to the collective through the layering of historical resonances, poetic representation, haptic temporality and synaesthesia.
Conclusion
This interdisciplinary and exciting confluence of ideas was hosted by Durham University’s Discovery Platform for Medical Humanities and Linköping University’s Division of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies. The Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham investigates what they call ‘hidden experiences’, and this rich and interdisciplinary conference delineated a wide range of such experiences of illness, madness, wellbeing and marginalisation. Approaching the moving image as a mode, form, genre or tool, the speakers addressed the question: what role does the moving image play?
While I do not seek to oversimplify what was an extremely diverse and nuanced array of perspectives, the four broad themes highlighted in this review attempt to encapsulate the presenters’ answers to this. The moving image can approach the unspeakable, it can foster multiplicity of identities, it can represent the marginalised and hold one’s attention, and it can actualise hidden experiences.
Convened by Veronica Heney, Fiona Johnstone and Edyta Just, this conference was efficiently organised and enthusiastically attended, with numbers in the audience only growing throughout the day. Discussions at the end of each panel and at the closing of the day reflected upon shared infinities throughout the conference, four of which I have presented here, and revealed multiple novel routes of exploration, collaboration and experimentation that can once again bring the medical humanities, art, and allied disciplines to a generative confluence of ideas and meaning-making.
About the Author:
Arya is an Events and Fellowship Coordinator at the Institute for Medical Humanities and is interested in gothic literature with a focus on South Asian culture and folklore. He is also a Research Assistant with the ReaderBank project, studying experiences of reading and imagination. Read another review by Arya here and follow his work on X @bhooterraja_08.
References:
Allen, R. (2023). Difficult and Bad. The London Review of Books.
Allen, Felicity (2023). Genre and Multiplicity in the Moving Image.
Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press.
Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015). Directed by Leigh Whannell.
Just, Edyta. (2024). ‘Horror & Life: Telling a Story in Order Not to Run’. Advances in Applied Sociology, 14, pp. 201-214.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
Palmer, Abi (2023). Abi Palmer Invents the Weather. Series of experimental short films. https://www.abipalmer.com/abi-palmer-invents-the-weather
Petronella, L. (2020). Själö: Island of Souls. Documentary Film.
Schillace, Brandy, host. “LivingBodiesObjects and the Tragedy at Bhopal.” Medical Humanities Podcast, July 11, 2024. https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2024/07/11/livingbodiesobjects-and-the-tragedy-at-bhopal/.
The Conjuring (2013). Directed by James Wan.
